TLDR - There is far from consensus in the vilification of red meat in dietary guidelines. This article dives into the details of the ongoing schism.
Mainstream dietary recommendations now commonly advise people to minimize the intake of red meat for health and environmental reasons. Most recently, a major report issued by the EAT-Lancet Commission recommended a planetary reference diet mostly based on plants and with no or very low (14 g/d) consumption of red meat. We argue that claims about the health dangers of red meat are not only improbable in the light of our evolutionary history, they are far from being supported by robust scientific evidence.
Full paper at the above link.
You are going to die of cancer and then we will se if red meat has an impact. There absolutely is consensus that too much is bad for you.
That is the consensus of the media narrative, to be sure.
Consensus is a social construct, science is about repeatable independent experiments. As this very paper indicates poorly sliced epidemiolocal data does not establish a causal link
Ok lets analyse your little paper: Because of a lack of page numbers I am going to cite with the number of the abstract
This is based on the false take that our body developed to a only meat diet. Humans are omnivores, that means that our usual food consits of a lot of different things. Cats for example are pure carnivores. So their diet has to consist on mostly meat. And in oir society what they get is the meat that we don’t want to eat, so no red meat and if so only small portions of it.
Yes they found a causality between these and cancer.
Only 39% of ingredients have a negative inpact and only 24% of those have a strong statistical significance. That means only 9.36% of tested foods have a statisticly strong influence. A lot less then the proclaimed 80% (Schonefeld and loannidis, 2013, page. 3, TABLE 1)
Ok I got to go now, but to sum up the reat of the article: I have not read a single proving argument. Everything just consisted of using sources that say red meat is bad and saying, something wild to direct the mind in a different direction. No own studies have been conducted! So the whole argumentation bases on could be.
But if you have any more abstracts you feel are important and should be conaidered feel free to reply :)
Thanks for taking the time to read the paper so we can have a discussion, i really appreciate it, genuinely.
I can’t find the graph you included in the paper, where is it from? The Schoenfeld paper? https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.112.047142 looks like it. I admit I have not read “Is Everything we eat associated with cancer? A Systematic cookbook review” yet.
I think the major thrust of the argument is that correlative studies of epidemiology are a poor place to set prescriptive guidance from.
Even the Schoenfeld 2013 says “Associations with cancer risk or benefits have been claimed for most food ingredients. Many single studies highlight implausibly large effects, even though evidence is weak. Effect sizes shrink in meta-analyses.”
The context of sick person confounders also needs to be accounted for in RCTs, such as sugar intake in diets, healthy patient confounders, etc. (A classic example would be smokers tend to eat red meat and ignore common health guidance, and also eat more red meat - we could try to control for the smokers, but they would skew any epidemiological results)
i.e.
This data point speaks to a confounder in the western cohort, I suspect its sugar and processed food.
It would be a interesting, and likely positive correlation, research question - Red Meat Plus High Carbohydrates all cause mortality? I suspect any combination of foods plus sugar will show a correlation!